A spokeswoman for the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) recently suggested to a room full of college students that gay activists take advantage of confused adolescents to advance their “political vision,” invoking the suicide of gay bullying victim Tyler Clementi to illustrate her point.

On February 17, NOM spokeswoman Jennifer Morse gave a speech on marriage and sexuality to a group of Catholic students from Iowa State University. During the Q & A portion of her presentation, she was asked how students should respond to peers who identify as LGBT.

Morse advised students to “be friends” with their LGBT peers, explaining that people who suffer from “gender confusion” need support to avoid sexual behavior that is “probably not the best thing for them.”

She went on to invoke the death of Tyler Clementi – the 18-year-old Rutgers student who committed suicide in 2010 after his roommate secretly recorded video of him kissing another man – while discussing what she characterized as the exploitation of vulnerable adolescents by gay activists:

MORSE: In friendship, as friends, you can support them and say, ‘maybe this person is trying to exploit you.’ Sometimes you hear about these things and you don’t hear the whole story in the media.That kid Tyler Clementi who killed himself, who threw himself off the George Washington Bridge? Do you know this story? Okay, then I’m not going to tell it. There was a much older man in the picture. There’s usually more to the story, right? And so I think friendship is what you have to offer. There are a lot of situations where people are doing something sexual that’s probably not the best thing for them and that would be better if they had somebody who would be friends with them without coming onto them or without judging them and that kind of stuff.

[…]

We get this idea that the gay rights movement is very militant and they’re demanding this and pushing that, but when you really get down to it, a lot of the young people are quite confused and lonely and need help and support and they’re getting help and support not from the Christian community, they’re getting help and support from the gay activists who have their own thing that they’re doing which is not necessarily to help the individuals but they’ve got some sort of political vision.

The day before Morse gave her speech to the Iowa State students, she spoke at a Catholic Women’s Conference where she explained that gay men are desperate to “feel better” about their “deeply wrong” sexuality and compared support for marriage equality to support for Nazism.